What I Have Been Given

Erin Doom

Oct 4

8 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

The Work of a Curator and Why I Am Building the Podvig Members' Library

Commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Hierotheus, Bishop of Athens

Commemoration of the Holy Martyr Domnina with Her Daughters of Syria

Anno Domini 2026, October 4

Gifts meant to be handed on.

RECENTLY, at a private dinner before HopeNet’s annual gala, I listened to the songwriter Josh Jenkins tell the story of how his vocation began.

His father was a songwriter. When Josh and his brother Matt were boys, their father would give each of them a yellow legal pad, send them into separate rooms, and tell them to write a song. It was a small assignment, repeated over time. But a father was teaching his sons to attend, to create, and eventually to discover their voices. Both boys became songwriters. Josh would later help write “Fancy Like” and “Buy Dirt,” songs carried into the world by voices more famous than his own.

It was an informal mini-concert, and Josh welcomed questions throughout the evening. Someone asked what it means to spend a life writing words that someone else will sing. I found myself wishing I could sit with him longer. I wanted to ask how much of a vocation can be hidden inside a father’s small assignment to his sons.

But the question that stayed with me came from the woman seated across the table. This one was directed toward me.

“What is your purpose in life?” she asked. “Why are you here on earth?”

I was unprepared for the question. For a moment, I had no answer. Then something came out before I had time to polish it:

I think I am here to give back everything I have been given.

Gifts Meant to Be Handed On

What surprised me later was the word given.

I've worked hard for much of what now fills my mind and my shelves. I studied. I read. I traveled. I wrote. I built institutions, taught classes, organized conferences, accumulated books, and filled folders with passages I didn't want to lose. But when asked what my life was for, I didn't describe those things as achievements. I described them as gifts.

And that's exactly what they were.

I was given a father who took me into the mission field when I was fourteen. Years later, I would return to Mexico and Colombia, but that first experience taught me to see beyond the small world I knew and placed the question of Christian witness inside me before I had words for it.

I was given Latin at East High and later Latin and Greek at Wichita State University under Dr. Kehoe. I was given extraordinary teachers: Dr. Gathiel, Dr. Miner, and eventually Fr. Andrew Louth. I do not take any of that for granted. It was given to me.

I was also given the education of Eighth Day Books and Warren Farha. I was given nearly twenty years at Eighth Day Institute, where the education begun in classrooms and among books continued through friendships, lectures, feasts, arguments, failures, and the sustained labor of building something.

Even my library began as a gift. When I traveled with Choice Lifestyle, Keith Malcolm and I looked for used bookstores in every city we visited. Keith was a mentor from my high-school youth group, the road manager for Choice Lifestyle, and a fellow bookaholic. Wherever the group traveled, we went looking for books.

I don't know whether that was the absolute beginning of my library, but it was certainly the beginning of a way of life. After I returned, I became a regular visitor to used bookstores. Then I discovered Eighth Day Books, and much of the rest of the story followed.

Christianity has a word for this movement: tradition. And it's not just information preserved from the past. It's something received so that it can be faithfully handed on. What the Church has received, she guards, inhabits, and gives. St. Irenaeus of Lyons received the apostolic proclamation and handed it on—not as dead material stored against loss, but as living truth capable of forming a people.

I'm beginning to think that's also what my life has been preparing me to do.

The Work of a Curator

I'm uncomfortable telling you why a library built from my own work might be worth entering. I love talking about books. I love remembering where an idea first found me, placing one passage beside another, and telling the stories of the people and experiences that have formed my life.

But that's different from selling myself. The moment I begin listing the books I've read, the years I've studied, or the things I've accumulated, I feel like I've crossed a line.

But if these things have been given, then naming them doesn't need to be an exercise in self-importance. It can instead be an account of stewardship.

A library is never only a collection of things. It's also the record of someone’s attention.

And if I'm asking you to trust the Podvig Members’ Library—to give it not only your money, but some portion of your limited attention—I should tell you what has been entrusted to me and why I believe I'm supposed to hand it on.

For nearly forty years, I have been gathering.

Books, certainly. But also marked passages, copied quotations, essays, lectures, PDFs, correspondence, commonplace entries, abandoned drafts, and folders devoted to particular persons and themes. The accumulation is substantial, but the numbers aren't the point.

The point is that whenever I encountered something worth keeping, I wanted to remember it, place it beside other things, understand what it illuminated, and eventually hand it on.

Years ago, I was peddling books for Eighth Day Books at an Association of Classical Christian Schools conference. Someone asked who had selected the books on our tables. I told him about Warren Farha.

Warren was a bookseller, but that word alone doesn't describe what he did. He was a curator. He spent decades learning which books mattered. He knew how one book belonged beside another, how a forgotten author could answer a contemporary question, and sometimes how to place the right book into the hands of the person standing in front of him.

This person and I began talking about the rise of classical Christian schools. These schools are giving young people access to an inheritance many adults have never received. But what about everyone who hasn't received this sort of education? What about the children who won't ever be able to attend such a school, or all the adults who have awakened late to the suspicion that something immense and beautiful has been withheld from them?

They need guides. And they need trustworthy curators.

That conversation gave me a word for something I had already been trying to do. I have long understood myself as a synthesizer: someone who gathers pieces, places them into relationship, and tries to perceive the whole they disclose.

But synthesis and curation belong together. A curator does not merely accumulate. He discerns, selects, orders, interprets, and hands on.

The Academy and the Unfinished Road

I learned that work beside Warren and through nearly twenty years of building Eighth Day Institute. But another, much longer road was running through those same years.

When the first board of the Saint John of Damascus Institute encouraged me to pursue a PhD, the purpose was never simply to add letters after my name. We hoped to create an academy. The doctoral work was meant to serve the work of teaching and formation.

I began at Durham in early 2006 under Fr. Andrew Louth. The project changed shape more than once. It eventually became a study of Charles Taylor, Georges Florovsky, secularism, Christian tradition, and the Church’s task in the modern world.

Beneath all the names and arguments was one question that had followed me from Colombia through Eighth Day Books, the Institute, the classroom, conferences, lectures, and thousands of pages of notes:

How can Christians receive the living tradition of the Church, inhabit it faithfully, and bear creative witness within a secular age?

I'm only now beginning to recognize that Podvig may be the academy I once hoped to build—not as a single program entered through one front door, but as a place of formation entered through many rooms.

Over the course of two versions, I wrote almost a hundred thousand words twice. How that happened is another story. Eventually, I reached the heading Conclusion. But I could not finish it. I kept reading and trying to rewrite, then reading and trying again.

The dissertation remained unfinished, but I've never stopped pondering its question. I kept reading. I kept gathering. I kept trying to understand how truth passes from a book into a person, from doctrine into perception, from the inheritance of the Church into a form of life.

That unfinished journey has now become The Long Conclusion [LINK TO SERIES INTRODUCTION; REMOVE THIS NOTE], a public attempt to finish the work and to tell the truth about failure, delay, and beginning again.

An Inn Along the Way

Maybe this road is not finally arriving at its end. Perhaps it has reached an inn. At an inn, the traveler does not pretend that the journey is over. He stops long enough to gather what the road has given him, to share a table, to tell what he has seen, and to receive what he will need for the next stretch.

In the strange world of ultrarunning, I would call such a place an aid station. The race is not over. You arrive depleted and in need of things you can't supply for yourself. There's food, water, a place to sit, and usually another tired traveler willing to share the table. You take stock of the road behind you, receive what you need, and prepare to continue.

My goal is for the Podvig Members’ Library to be precisely that sort of place for you.

A Library Worth Entering

The Members' Library is where forty years of reading, nearly twenty years of institutional work, an unfinished doctorate, a lifetime of bookselling and teaching, and all the people, failures, practices, and questions encountered along the way begin to take ordered form.

But it will not be a warehouse containing everything I've accumulated. The internet already gives us more information than we can receive. Another pile of PDFs will not form anyone.

The Library is not everything I've saved. It's what, after forty years of attention, I've judged worthy to hand on.

Its value lies in selection, sequence, context, and connection: this person beside that question; this ancient text beside that modern pressure; this book followed by that practice.

The aim is not merely to tell you what to read. It's to help you see where you are, where you might begin, what might come next, and how what you behold might become something you practice.

That's why the Members’ Library belongs within Podvig.

The monthly Letter opens a theme. The linked digital companion page allows every reader to travel farther into it. The Library is where the path deepens—through essays, reading guides, lives, source texts, practices, correspondence, and ordered journeys through the persons and questions that have occupied my attention for decades.

I can't promise that every shelf will be complete. I'm building the Library as I continue to recover, order, and understand the material entrusted to me.

But I can promise that it will be curated.

Nothing will be there simply to make the collection appear larger. Each addition should help answer the question at the heart of both my dissertation and Podvig:

How does truth become a form of life?

Handing It On

The first board of the Saint John of Damascus Institute could not have known how long the road would be when they urged me toward Durham. I certainly didn't.

Their advice may only now be approaching its fullest usefulness—not because I've finally acquired a credential, but because the long pursuit has formed the work I'm able to offer.

I'm still a book peddler. I currently sell water and deliver packages before dawn. But I'm also still doing what I learned to do beside Warren: gathering what's worth keeping, placing things into illuminating relation, and trying to put the right thing into another person’s hands.

The Podvig Members’ Library is where I intend to hand it on.